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Rukifellth comments on More "Stupid" Questions - Less Wrong
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I bet tabooing/rigorously defining "subject" and "everyone" in the context of the first line of the wikipedia summary would do it. At least to the extent that the position would become either incoherent or tautological.
Subject: a word which is synonymous with person.
Everyone: All persons that exist, have existed or will exist.
Though I have a feeling these definitions aren't rigorous. I'm also stumped on "numerically identical".
I think "numerically identical" is just a stupid way of saying "they're the same".
So now we have
Now taboo "person".
(You're allowed to reword my above definition if you think I've got it wrong.)
Your definition is good, and I'm having a hard time tabooing the word person, so what if I tried making a prediction?
If Open Individualism is true, then there is no moral consequence of fission or fusion, and nothing remarkable about such a process.
That uses the word "moral", which is well known to hide many mysteries. After fissioning someone, how would you judge if your prediction was right or wrong?
Another prediction is that there is no difference between a clone of myself and another person.
It may also help to consider that my interpretation of OI seems to imply that murder is not wrong, which is quite an odd result.
Moral in this case is the adjective that labels the set of all actions that could be Right or Wrong. In turn, Right is the set of all actions that cause warmth, benign camaraderie and relief of negative emotions, and Wrong is the set of all actions that cause alienation and other suffering, as well as the extinguishment of warmth and benign camaraderie.
The reason fusion would have no such Right or Wrong consequence is that since there is only one person in the universe, there is no one who would be destroyed in such a process. Indeed, since no one has disappeared, nothing about the process will be alienating or frightening. The entire theory can serve as a solution to fusion and fission problems, though I suppose making everyone a p-zombie could also do that.
In English, at least, there appears to be no good way to differentiate between "this is the same thing" and "this is an exactly similar thing (except that there are at least two of them)". In programming, you can just test whether two objects have the same memory location, but the simplest way to indicate that in English about arbitrary objects is to point out that there's only one item. Hence the need for phrasing like "numerically identical".
Is there a better way?